Today is my first Cinco de Mayo since leaving southern California, and clearly the holiday is much less a part of the culture in southern Florida than it is there. It’s not a day that I’ve ever celebrated myself, and given the ongoing disaster that has been Mexican governments, alternating between feudalism and crony socialism, since Independence and up to the present day, I’m often puzzled that the Mexicans celebrate it, though I suppose they’re still better off than they were as a colony, given who the colonialists were. It wasn’t, of course, the day that they won their independence–that happened much earlier–but it was almost certainly the day that they cemented it.

But for Americans, there is one thing to celebrate today–it was a spectacular (which is to say, typical) military disaster for the French.